We’ll be talking about Royal Opera’s Jenufa two decades from now

Leos Janacek cared about words. He’d hang about central Brno, notebook in hand, eavesdropping on conversations and trying to capture their exact rhythm and intonation in scribbled semitones and quavers. So there’s a tidy irony in the fact that the opera that made his name isn’t really called Jenufa at all. Janacek called it Jeji Pastorkyna, and if it’s easy enough for non-Czech speakers to understand why that was never likely to travel, it’s not without consequence. Another woman drives this story, and in the original title she’s present but unnamed: Jenufa’s stepmother, described simply as Kostelnicka, or churchwarden. Jeji Pastorkyna translates roughly as ‘Her Stepdaughter’.

No matter. When you watch the opera, the complexities untangle themselves, and you might even argue that the renaming heightens the dramatic effect. If you expect Jenufa to be the central figure, it’s easier to assume that the unbending Kostelnicka is the standard wicked stepmother, and adjust your expectations accordingly — ready to be blindsided in Act Two, when this unlikeable older woman (we never even learn her Christian name) commits an act of unforgiveable evil from motives of absolute love. The central strength of Claus Guth’s new production is that it avoids that obvious jolt and offers something more gradual, more complex, and in terms of Janacek’s emotional world — where nothing human is beyond comprehension, if not sympathy — more rewarding.

Karita Mattila plays the Kostelnicka and on the first night, at least, this felt like one of those performances that operagoers will be talking about two decades from now: charismatic, proud and with that formidable soprano still burning (when necessary) with magnesium brilliance. But Mattila is also capable of a terrible, vulnerable softness, both vocally and dramatically, and in Guth’s conception she’s displaying signs of emotional subsidence as early as Act One.